Peter Costello
O Shining Light: Old English Meditations for Advent and Christmas, introduction and commentary
by Jacob and Mamie Riyeff (Gracewing, £9.99)
In the Venerable Bede there is a passage where a pagan Saxon king likens the life of an individual to the flight of a small birds through the warm and lighted hall of a Anglo-Saxon home, in from the darkness by one window, out by another, a brief moment of life from nothing to nothing. But this when it came to the Saxons from Irish and European missionaries this was not the message of Christianity: that was a message of an eternity of God’s love.
Here in Ireland we inevitably hear and read a lot about Celtic or early Irish Christianity. This leaves many, I suspect, to think there was nothing of the same kind in the other island. But here two Americans have garnered the Christmas lyrics from the Anglo-Saxon Book of Exeter, to which they had added an introduction and commentary that provides an illuminating insight into the outlook of early Anglo-Saxon faith across the water.
The manuscript which contains them is the largest anthology of Anglo-Saxon literature that survives and dates from the 900s in part. This edition (though not a new translation – their texts are taken from an academic version of 1936) makes not only an ideal little book for Advent and Christmas reading, but a resource to dip into all the year round.
It reminds me in a way of Frank O’Connor’s album The Little Monasteries. In both books there is the voice of new faith, fresh as the dew, which is deeply appealing.